


vega, et altair

by villanelle



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 06:43:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4596801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanelle/pseuds/villanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Probabilities, possibilities. Akane used to believe that there were infinite outcomes for them. As the chance of an ordinary ending dwindles further, she begins to contemplate that perhaps, there had only ever been one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vega, et altair

**Author's Note:**

> Movie timeline and hypothetical after. I like to overanalyze the month in which events happen and practice writing angsty drabbles.

_\- wishes on paper -_

Intertwined with Akane’s memories of Kougami are fragmentary images and remnant sensations of that autumn when she first met him, that winter when she -- _no_ , she corrects herself, _the whole of Division 1_ \-- lost him. He, whose back so often presented a lone wolf silhouette, the collar between his broad shoulders lined appropriately with fur. She could not deny that she had drawn comfort from his words and the voice that delivered them, but she also remembers how his aloofness of tone could sometimes render the atmosphere even chillier, his mouth expelling harsh truths along with curls of cigarette smoke and visible wisps of winter exhale. How short and yet how monumental that season had been, heralding his end and her beginning in a profession that consumed its disciples like a serpent sustaining itself on its own tail. Back at headquarters, stepping into Kasei’s office always sent a shiver down Akane’s spine, occasions suggestive that she too would face an inevitable winter.

Whenever Akane thought of her path encountering the former Enforcer’s again, she tended to visualize the Kougami of that season, not the two of them perspiring in a foreign climate and exchanging a moss green guerilla jacket and most importantly, disappointingly, so far away from where she wanted to bring him back to.

To reunite with him in summer, in July of all months...Akane has never thought of herself as particularly superstitious and subscribes to no horoscopes, but she gazes up at the sky, the constellations overhead so much more distinct in their dotted stitchings than they appear in Tokyo, and she releases a sound of almost bitter amusement.

“Yesterday was Tanabata,” she explains to his questioning glance, and because she does not want to correlate the divide between them with that reflected in the stars, she lightly adds. “Did you never make tanzaku wishes as a child, Kougami-san?”

If he’s surprised by this conversational tangent, his features mask it well, and Kougami indulges her temporal observation with his usual sardonic humor.

“I did, but I think the gods stopped granting my wishes a long time ago.”

He doesn’t move out of the stone corridor’s shadows, but his eyes follow the arc of moonlight from Akane’s upturned face to the beckoning glimmers in the sky.

“No wonder I found myself literally overthrown at your hands then,” he remarks, and he _is_ proud of her, this former baby-faced rookie that he’d taken ephemerally under his wing, but having just experienced how fluidly she now reacts to danger, he would not presume to take credit for this transformation at all. In place of expressing pride then, he deems it better to remind her of how the distance between them has expanded even further, and if there truly exist powers like fate and fortune, then he does not mind them favoring her future over his.  “After all, Vega will always shine brighter than Altair.”

Akane looks unshaken by his words though, her countenance a mask to match his, and he remembers a time when he could read each flicker in her expression, each tremor in her voice, so much more clearly.

“What you said four years ago,” Kougami questions quietly. “That we’ll meet again as ordinary people. Do you still believe that?”

Turning away from the stone balustrade, Akane recalls how she watched the elevator door obscure his face right after he made the promise he subsequently broke. She is not sure whether she is giving into her more earnest ghost or her more embittered psyche as she tells him,

“Sure, consider it a promise.”

* * *

 

_\- incarnations of Verona -_

__

_"Sometimes, I feel quite certain that Ginoza-san must dislike me."_

A rather pedestrian snapshot of a weekday morning, one of the many scattered between more rousing memories of active pursuit outside the office. Akane, scarcely two weeks into her role as Shepherd 2, mumbling this conjecture more into her coffee cup than at Kougami, yet looking towards him as if for confirmation. Kougami doubts that either his face or his words had fully conveyed in response how the roots of Gino’s disappointment went so much deeper into the past.

Later on, he will think back to Akane’s impulsive hunch and laugh, for the three of them since they will never laugh together again, at how wrong she was.

___

Along the shredded tissue on the inside of his cheek, Kougami can taste the metallic tang of blood mixed with spittle, but a part of him still wants to hoarsely congratulate Gino for landing such an unrestrained punch and maybe tease him about evident time spent with the sparring drones. He read a glimmer of mirth in Gino’s eyes before the impact reintroduced his back to the concrete, but between the bruised and swollen lids of his eyes, Kougami’s vision wavers, and Gino looms, seemingly as tall as one of the stone guardians belonging to Angkor’s enduring galleries. The echo of what the Enforcer said just a moment ago lingers between them.

_Don’t make Inspector Tsunemori shoulder more burdens than she already has._

A protective admonishment certainly, but one delivered with the exhaustion of having watched father and friend submerge into vortices of obsession. More acutely, Kougami hears the firm determination in Gino’s voice to not stand idly by and watch the downfall of yet another Inspector.

Replacing the urge to make light of the punch is a sudden awareness of shame, and Kougami says nothing as Gino walks away.

___

Kougami figures that he has half an hour to get out of Shambala’s government and industrial district and make his way to the pickup van, forty minutes if he’s lucky. What he does not account for is crossing into Akane’s radius again. At the edge of a building terrace stand Akane and two MWPSB-jacketed members that he does not recognize, though most likely, he presumes that these are the men who have replaced Masaoka and himself.

Adjusting the holo overlay band, glitchy in its discarded and found state, around his neck, Kougami takes a second precaution and steps behind a courtyard pillar to watch as Akane exchanges words with the other bureau personnel. In the elongated shadow of the pillar, the numbers on his nabbed wristwatch inform him that he’s already stood too long in one place.

And yet, as he peers around the column again, his feet do not budge upon seeing Akane now alone on the terrace, her face not upturned in search of constellations but rather, angled to scrutinize the view below with an almost expectant expression, as if she too could sense his proximity. For a disoriented, fantastical moment, he feels as though he has stepped into the shoes of an actor on a Shakespearean stage, but the glare of the sun and the beating of chopper blades cutting through the air above make it all too clear that the distance between them is no incarnation of Verona.

What would he say anyway? _Don’t chase as I chased. For your sanity, for Gino’s. And if the gods entertain mortal wishes, then let it be that we come to less wretched ends than those before us._

Perhaps, he will see her again in four years or seven, but that he can accept. Altair to her Vega.

_But let us suffer no more ill fates beyond that._

* * *

_\- rosemary for remembrance -_

Ten minutes shy of midnight, Akane comes home from Kaori’s wedding party with her heels in one hand and a slightly smooshed bouquet in the other. In the car that took her home, the woodsy, uplifting spice of floral scent had felt like the only thing keeping her awake.

_“I personalized each bunch for my bridesmaids,” Kaori tells her with a wink as she hands Akane the pleasing assemblage. “Ivory roses in the middle, these purple flowers are rosemary, and bay leaves throughout!”_

_Her friend presses the florist-smoothed stems against Akane’s palm. “Bring it home, okay? It’ll brighten up your apartment, and you won’t have to smell all that awful, lingering smoke anymore!”_

In the kitchen of her admittedly dim apartment, Akane opens up a couple of cabinets in search of a vase before giving up and proceeding into her bedroom to toss the spray of flowers on the desk. She wrinkles her nose a little upon entering the room. Kaori was right. Her apartment does smell of smoke, stale and acrid and intimating all too clearly the insomniac habits of an inhabitant who’s barely home in the first place. This weekend, she promises herself though she has made this promise before, she will definitely throw out the ashtray and find time to flush out the burrowed essence of tobacco.

As she sheds her dress for a nightshirt, Akane glances back at the bouquet, at the smaller rosemary flowers and pointed, elliptical leaves accenting the white of the roses.

_“I’m not trying to be your mother,” Kaori tells her insistently, but the twist of her friend’s mouth is nevertheless reminiscent of recently voiced parental concerns. “I just want you to be as happy as I am. To smile like you used to.”_

_She gestures at one of the sprigs on the bouquet’s outer rim. “At the florist, they told me about this funny little tradition, and I thought it’d make you laugh but also maybe try it? Sleep with the bay leaves and rosemary under your pillow. Rosemary for remembrance and the bay leaves to dream of someone you might love in the future.”_

_Akane laughs, openhearted for a moment, and plucks the sprig of rosemary out to tickle Kaori’s nose with it. “I am happy. I’m happy for you. Having some mysterious, potential future spouse appear in my dreams would bring more terror than gratification I think.”_

Alone in her room, Akane sits down on the bed, her fingers acquiring the same itch as whenever she passes by a window or vendor stocking that particular brand of cigarettes.

It wouldn’t hurt, she decides as she reaches for the bouquet and tugs out a few stems, their fragrance already banishing the smell of smoke from her immediate vicinity.

_And if I have none of the dreams that were promised, then that knowledge hurts no one but me._

* * *

 

_\- language of secrets -_

 

His time here is up.

Treading the halls of the ruins that have served as his makeshift home for months now, Kougami surveys the frantic activity around him, families and guerillas making rapid-fire decisions about what essentials to keep and what to abandon. This time tomorrow, most of those congregated here will have moved towards a newly chosen camp, in anticipation of an approaching military unit intent on forcibly evacuating the present site.

Kougami himself has no more material possessions to his name than the knapsack slung over one shoulder and the rifle strapped over the other. He does not presume to guess what others will want to bring for the journey ahead.

“You gonna miss this place?”

The man asking this question is old, one of the more wizened faces Kougami has seen of late. The elder’s cheeks stretch into a smile, and Kougami is struck by the fleeting resemblance to his memory of Masaoka.

Tapping his cane against one of the larger stones, a jigsaw piece to a long-eroded carving, the old man counsels him, “Better say your goodbyes quickly, sonny.”

Favoring one leg over the other, the man’s cane-aided steps clatter past him. Nearly at the end of the corridor though, the old man’s back straightens, and he waves his rod at the walls. “If you have secrets you can’t share with anyone else but the gods, then confess and bury them here lest they can’t hear you where we’re going.”

A secret for no one else to hear.

Above him, the sky is red and gold and cloudless blue, promising that he will be blanketed by a tapestry of stars tonight. Lower temperatures have not yet arrived with the sunset though, and Kougami itches for a smoke and a breeze. Closing his eyes, he’s hit by the afterimage, the colors of the sky imprinted onto his senses, the streaks of saturated hue morphing into colorful strips of paper, their inscribed wishes flapping, undecipherable, in the wind.

He waits for his direct surroundings to clear out before approaching the closest hole-riddled wall and bending his head to one of its ancient hollows.

_And if no one else hears this but me, then let the secret rest and die with me._

* * *

  

_\- on meeting again -_

In sacrament and scripture, in literature and verse, waiting, the will to wait out a period seemingly eternal, is portrayed as an ultimate virtue, its gendered expectation implied. From Penelope to Sita, what sort of war widow remarries before confirming her beloved’s corpse?

Akane is not and will never be a widow, but she catches sight of her reflection, now strange to her own eyes, distorted on a metal surface, and she thinks of rituals of mourning, the taste of ashes on her tongue.

She has never been particularly attached to her hair. Utility always called to her more than vanity, and so she had shorn it regularly all her life.

But not like this.

Transfixed by this unfamiliar self, the folds of her white gown dancing in the metallic sheen, Akane lifts a hand to gingerly run her fingers across her bared skull. The shave was necessary, the awaiting hive told her, for the excision surgery.

An oracle has no need for the corporeal. For hair. For attachments.

She thinks of blue sky, blue eyes, the blue of the Dominator reflecting probabilities and possibilities into her eyes. Akane used to believe that there were infinite outcomes for them. Perhaps, she muses now, there had only ever been one.

 

 

_The next time we meet, you’ll be in a position to judge me._

 

 

* * *

 **  
** referenced traditions and observances (I apologize for my lax research!):  
  
1) **wishes on paper** - The Japanese festival Tanabata and the Chinese Qi Xi Jie celebrate the once-in-a-year meeting of two celestial deities who are also represented by the stars Vega and Altair.    
  
**2) incarnations of Verona -** _Romeo and Juliet_ doesn’t explicitly mention a balcony, but many renditions of the play include a balcony scene. Also, tourism has probably made Casa di Giulietta’s balcony one of the most famous in the world.   
  
**3) rosemary for remembrance -** The phrase itself derives from  _Hamlet_. English lore has various superstitions around how placing rosemary and bay leaves under your pillow will help induce dreams of who you’ll marry.  
  
**4) language of secrets -** Not sure if this is a real tradition, but the film,  _In the Mood for Love_ , features an anecdote about how secrets, that cannot be shared, should be spoken into hollows, and the movie ends with the male lead whispering his secret at Angkor Wat.  
  
**4) on meeting again -** Cutting/shaving one’s hair off is tied to a multitude of cultural meanings - widowhood for some in Hinduism, loss of status/femininity in Tokugawa Japan, and very commonly of course, a resolution to break away from the past.

  
  



End file.
